Yeah... the African-American Jazz composer Sun Ra who died in the mid-Nineties and who used Jazz as a vehicle for a series of cosmologies. Cosmologies that were worked out in his albums, in his stage performances and in his particular attention to electronic technology. Sun Ra is especially famous for integrating synthetic technologies, synthesizers, keyboards into Jazz music. At the same time he is also important for introducing percussion, introducing extremely complex, polyrhythmic structures into Jazz. So these two impulses, on the one hand synthesizers and keyboards, and on the other hand polyrhythm and extreme percussion, kind of polarized Jazz, totally changed the shape of it, made it extremely complex music. And allowed it to become the vehicle for an extreme cosmology which linked aspects of the past to aspects of the future. So on the one hand you had the space race and you had the whole imagined solar systems of planets, the planets Plutonia, Nubia. On the other hand you had a fascination with the despotic system of Egypt and the Pharaos. And Sun Ra's key breakthrough was to make these identifications, with Egypt from the past on the one hand and space on the other hand... was to make Jazz a vehicle for moving in these two directions at once. And he kept on reinventing these two directions. So you have these four poles. You have percussion, you have synthesis, you have Egypt and you have space. And these four poles can become the vehicles for a wholecosmology which you can reinvent over time. And he did it from the Fifties to the Nineties, over two hundred albums. And with his group of musicians, the Arkestra, this group of twenty-one horn musicians... you can hear that the Arkestra is a conjunction of the Arch and orchestra. So it's the idea that listening to Sun Ra is boarding the Arkestra and going for a journey through the sound worlds of his records with his Arkestra. The Arkestra is a vehicle, and listening is an imaginative projection into the sound world of their records. So you go with the Arkestra and you go for a journey through the cosmology of his records. And this was Sun Ra's key idea, to conceptualize Jazz as a vehicle for internal communication which then could add and take away aspects as you wanted. You could add poetry, you could add philosophy, you could add song titles, as Jazz became this system for a very complex idea of thinking.

19:36:56 KODWO ESHUN

Yeah... Sun Ra's Space Is The Place was a film made in 1974, made from a particular album by Sun Ra. Sun Ra conducted at least three versions of Space Is The Place as a particular, twenty minute form of music. And Space Is The Place is a particular movie which joins Blaxploitation themes of the era. So that would be, for instance, the emphasis on pimps, the emphasis on particular pimp figures with fussy hats and sharp clothes and very stylish, but at the same time quite predatory characteristics... with, again, a cosmological theme. So in Space Is The Place you have a pimp character, but he's not exactly a pimp, he's more like the devil, or the anti-christ, or the anti-principle. And this pimp figure is playing with Sun Ra for the fate of the planet. And they play this giant card game, and the winner of the card game holds the fate of the Earth in his hands. So this cross-section, this transplanting of Blaxploitation themes with cosmological themes, this is one of the main drives of Space Is The Place. And the whole film goes through the... the impetus of it, goes through... it narrativizes this cross-section, and then you see what happens. And it points out that Sun Ra's project was world historical and gigantic and messianic. And that Sun Ra at his time was, and still is, extremely experimental and advanced. He always saw music as a vehicle that had huge implications. He always saw his music as a point for exploration on the widest possible level. So he wanted to reinvent history in the most radical way possible. And it's quite clear now, at the end of this century, at the end of one century and the beginning of the other, that Sun Ra is a major composer, a major Twentieth Century composer, whose main themes and preoccupations have really barely been understood. There's more than two hundred records to be listened to carefully and analyzed. And it's clear that the Twenty-first Century will be studying Sun Ra much closer than the Twentieth Century did.

19:39:27 KODWO ESHUN

The whole point of Sun Ra is that space, for Sun Ra, isn't a metaphor. It's a transvaluation. It's the idea he uses to transvaluate African-American and therefore American and therefore European history. It's not a metaphor for escape. It's the turning point from which you can see that what you thought was black history is white mythology. Therefore you can destroy black history, therefore you can destroy white mythology, and you can put your own in its place. So it's a very powerful idea, it's a transvaluated project. It's not a metaphor or an analogy, it's the point of destruction and the point of reconstruction.